The Big Story
A false alarm Wednesday night sent Israelis into their shelters expecting an imminent attack from a second front opening with Lebanon. After confirmed reports of Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel and the IDF responding with missile strikes into Lebanon, rumors circulated early Wednesday evening of multiple drones crossing into Israeli airspace along with Hezbollah fighters infiltrating across the border using paragliders. Shortly after the rumors began spreading, the IDF issued its advisory to shelter in place, but the military quickly rescinded the order, calling it a mistake and attributing it to human error. The confusion might have been compounded by Hezbollah carrying out what appeared to be feinting and probing maneuvers on Israel’s border—a tactic designed to tie up an enemy’s defenses.
With a massive IDF force staged at the Gaza border awaiting orders to begin an expected ground assault, and Hezbollah probing Israel in the north, President Biden delivered an unusually powerful speech on Tuesday night declaring his full-throated commitment to Israel’s security. With at least 22 Americans already confirmed as killed in the Hamas attack and an estimated 17 thought to be held as hostages in Gaza, Biden compared Hamas to ISIS, condemned the group’s use of human shields, and affirmed Israel’s duty to respond to the attack. “If this attack would have happened to America, I know we would have acted swiftly and strongly,” the president said in his address while promising material support to the IDF and issuing a warning seemingly aimed at deterring Hezbollah from entering the war. And yet, despite Biden’s steadfastness, his assurances, which were well received by many Israelis, seem to work at cross-purposes with established U.S. strategy in the region, which has included constraining Israel from carrying out attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah—groups that are funded and backed by Iran—out of concern that such moves would upset the planned U.S.-Iranian détente that has been a centerpiece of both the Obama and Biden administrations. The savagery of the Hamas attack seems to have changed that calculation, as the White House now understands that Israel’s survival depends on reestablishing effective deterrence, but there is no way to know the limits of U.S. support or how it will interact with Israeli operational imperatives until after the real fighting starts.
—JS
The Rest
→You might have seen the story circulating that Israel ignored repeated warnings from Egypt about an impending attack from Gaza because Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was too fixated on the West Bank. Take it with a grain of salt. According to the version in The Times of Israel, these warnings included a direct phone call from Egyptian Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel to Netanyahu only 10 days before the attack, predicting “something unusual, a terrible operation” by Hamas. The story was repeated on Wednesday by U.S. Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who announced after a closed-door intelligence briefing that Egypt “warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” though he conceded it wasn’t clear “at what level” the warning was given.
Netanyahu’s office has issued blanket denials of these allegations, calling them “fake news.” But don’t take his word for it—this story smells. According to these accounts, Egypt was aware of a large, imminent Hamas terror attack from Gaza, which was clearly aimed at destroying the U.S.-sponsored Saudi-Israeli peace talks. So Egyptian officials ran to warn Bibi Netanyahu—but didn’t tell the United States?
It’s an amateurish concoction. Why? Let’s start with the fact that the United States pays Egypt billions of dollars annually to know what the Egyptian military is doing and what the Egyptian security services are seeing, and Israel doesn’t pay Egypt one dime. The country to which the Egyptians would have gone with such important information affecting a major U.S. regional policy initiative is the United States, not Israel. But there is no one from the Biden administration expressing outrage or even dismay that Cairo didn’t read in its American patrons on this alleged intelligence, and no one in Washington attempting to explain how such apparently critical information failed to make its way into the president’s daily briefing. Also, Egyptian intelligence officers talk to their Israeli counterparts, not to Israel’s political echelon. If Egypt needed to deliver a message to Netanyahu, it would have been delivered by President Sisi, not a spy chief.
What’s interesting to professional observers about this kind of obvious fakery is what it is intended to hide. Perhaps the United States did have information from the Egyptians—or, more likely, from its own collection systems—that it neglected for whatever reasons to pass on to the Israelis. It’s plausible to suspect that such a failure, whether purposeful or not, would make some people nervous, particularly when faced with what was surely the unanticipated scale and success of the Hamas attack.
→The estimated Israeli death toll from the Hamas attacks climbed to more than 1,200 on Wednesday, according to the Israeli military, as security forces and aid organizations continued to work their way through devastated communities in southern Israel. Another 3,000 Israelis have been injured, while the fate of the roughly 150 people abducted into the Gaza Strip remains unknown. On the Palestinian side, estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry claim 1,100 dead and more than 5,000 wounded from Israeli air strikes, while the Israeli military says it has found the bodies of 1,500 Hamas fighters within Israel.
Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/death-toll-from-hamas-onslaught-passes-1000-idf-kills-terrorists-in-southern-israel/
→The confirmed death toll for U.S. citizens killed by Hamas rose to 22 on Wednesday, per a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, who added that Israeli authorities have not yet finished counting the bodies.
→Hamas rockets, meanwhile, rained down on central and southern Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing two in the Eshkol region and injuring one in Ashkelon. Further barrages targeted Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv, setting off sirens in Tel Aviv, Rishon Lezion, and Ashdod, though no deaths or injuries were reported for these attacks. A Palestinian was killed by a stray rocket that landed in Baqa al-Sharqiya in the West Bank.
→As Israel gears up for a potential ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, observers inside and outside the country are weighing the possibility of a second front opening in the north, complicating Israeli military plans and raising the specter of Israel’s first two-front war since 1973. Rockets, mortars, and guided antitank missiles have been launched at Israel from positions inside southern Lebanon and Syria, provoking retaliatory strikes from the IDF, and on Monday, Israeli troops clashed with fighters from Palestinian Islamic Jihad along the Lebanese border, leaving two Israelis and three Palestinians dead. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that fought the IDF to a standstill over 34 days in 2006, is a strategic asset of Iran, just like Hamas and the Assad regime in Syria. Indeed, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Monday, this past weekend’s attacks were jointly planned by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. The United States and other Western governments reportedly warned Hezbollah on Wednesday not to join or further escalate the conflict.
Read more here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/15-rockets-anti-tank-missile-fired-from-lebanon-idf-shells-3-hezbollah-posts/
→Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday his plan to form a unity government with members of the opposition, including National Unity Party leader and former general Benny Gantz, who served as defense minister during the last round of fighting in Gaza in 2021. Netanyahu, Gantz, and current Defense Minister Yoav Gallant will lead a three-person “war management cabinet,” with a fourth place reserved for former PM Yair Lapid, who previously conditioned his participation on the sidelining of “extremists” within the former Netanyahu coalition. The agreement puts an end—for now—to the bitter political battles centered around Netanyahu’s proposed reforms to the country’s judiciary, which had consumed Israeli society for the better part of a year. In a speech Tuesday, Netanyahu said, “The most important action is to establish the unity of the nation. The division within us is over. We are all united. And when we are united—we win.”
Read more here: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza/card/netanyahu-agrees-to-form-national-unity-government-g0fXeYS2IRive628tr2S
→Number of the day: 32. That’s the percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 who think that Hamas is “deliberately striking Israeli civilian areas,” according to a YouGov survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults. For Americans over age 65 and aged 45 to 64, the percentages agreeing with that statement were 76% and 62%, respectively, falling to 44% among those aged 30 to 44.
Read the rest of the survey here: https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/survey-results/daily/2023/10/09/76e96/2
→American universities are the best in the world, so it’s no surprise to see them leading the way in the development of euphemisms to refer to the slaughter of Jewish civilians by Islamists. After Saturday’s terrorist attacks, Cornell University President Martha Pollack announced to the campus community that “the loss of life is always tragic, whether caused by human actions such as terrorism, war or mass shootings, or by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, or floods.” In a subsequent statement, Pollack clarified that the Hamas attacks were terrorism, which she condemned. Notably absent from either missive was the word Jews. At Columbia Law School, Dean Gillian Lester was forced into damage-control mode after issuing a statement over the weekend lamenting the “violence that erupted in Israel.” But spare a thought for these poor bureaucrats. They’re caught in their own two-front war: between Jewish students and employees who just watched an Islamist terror group livestream the murder of fellow Jews, on the one hand, and progressive student groups “honor[ing] the martyrs” of Hamas and calling for resistance to “the Zionist Entity” by “any means necessary,” on the other.
→But elite academia’s clumsy reaction to these terrorist attacks is no accident, as Geoff Shullenberger argues in Compact—it’s the result of decades of these institutions championing the same theories of “decolonization” now being taken to their logical conclusion by Hamas’ campus fanboys. As Shullenberger writes:
There has been no more fraught subject than Israel in elite universities in recent decades. Most of them have influential constituencies on both sides of the conflict, and they have consequently acted in contradictory ways, often attracting the ire of both Israel’s supporters and its opponents. But their reluctance and awkwardness in responding to the current situation hints at a problem deeper than these divided loyalties. For years, elite colleges—and other influential institutions—have lent their prestige to once-radical concepts like decolonization, seeming to imagine that they could be kept separate from the gruesome histories out of which they emerged. Fanon, the intellectual godfather of “decolonial” thought, wasn’t so naïve. As the world becomes more dangerous again, the luxury of metaphorical radicalism may prove too costly to sustain.
Read the rest here: https://compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-therapeutic-decolonization
TODAY IN TABLET:
How to Be an Ally, by Maggie Phillips
What can non-Jews do to stand by the Jewish community during this crisis?
Gaza, My Lost Home, by Yasmine Mohammed
There are no sides in this war. There is only mourning
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Gaza, My Lost Home
There are no sides in this war. There is only mourning.
By Yasmine Mohammed
My father lived his whole life with the hope that there might be a peaceful two-state solution. He spent his last years making YouTube videos on the topic and telling anyone who would listen about his family’s olive groves in Gaza. I am actually kind of relieved that he left this earth before he had to watch Hamas slaughter his dream on video, for all the world to see. Hamas has ensured that there will be no more Palestine, and no more hope for an independent state.
People send flippant messages to me asking “are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” as if we are all watching a football match. Are you wearing a blue jersey or red? I am wearing neither. I am in black. I am in mourning for the lost Israeli and Palestinian lives. I am in mourning for the Palestine that could have been. With a gorgeous waterfront overlooking the Mediterranean Sea that was recently made safe to swim in, with fertile soil that once sustained ancient olive groves. With land rich with resources for success.
It also had the funding. Generous governments, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals have been flooding the area with billions of dollars for decades. But instead of focusing on a potential tourist industry or building hospitals and schools and helping the Gazan people thrive on the land, the area was overrun by terrorists.
The world knows Hamas now as terrorists who have committed depraved atrocities that would even make ISIS blush. But the people of Gaza already knew them. They have been suffering in relative silence under these monsters for years. Anytime a Gazan dares to raise their voice in criticism, their throat is slit immediately, making it brutally obvious that it's best to keep quiet. Even those who hated Hamas chanted their allegiance to them loudly, in fear of their lives and their family’s lives.
Fellow Islamic regimes like Iran and Afghanistan are reveling in the rivers of Israeli blood. They do not see Jewish people as humans. They see them as things that need to be eradicated, as per the Hadith by their Prophet Muhammad which instructs them that Muslims must kill Jews until not one Jew is standing. Even the rocks and the trees will work with the Muslims against Jews, Muhammad teaches, calling out, “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me! Come kill him!”
Even in Egypt, a supposedly more progressive Muslim majority country, a police officer took it upon himself to murder two Israeli tourists who were visiting ancient ruins in Alexandria. He killed their guide too, who was probably trying to protect them. The tourist industry has been relatively nonexistent in Egypt due first to the revolution and then the pandemic. Now the country is suffering greatly under soaring inflation that is threatening lives daily. And yet, killing Jews was more important.
I never shared my father’s optimism. I never could imagine the two states living side by side. The past 75 years have been delaying the inevitable. These two Abrahamic faiths hate each other, and the only way there could have ever been hope is if both groups progressed beyond their ancient books. But both sides did the opposite. Israel has been pulled further and further into the Orthodox right wing and Gaza has become more and more extremist, electing terrorists who follow a literal interpretation of the ancient scriptures. There could have been hope 70 years ago, when Israel was being founded by secular hippies and terrorists had not yet overrun Gaza, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time now, and the mercury has been rising for decades.
Almost all of my father’s family is scattered across the globe, like most Palestinians. There are second and third generations being born in the diaspora with no connection to the land anymore. This is not new for the Middle East: Jewish people with roots in every country from Algeria to Yemen have been all but eradicated from their homelands; Egypt has very few people remaining from the hundreds of thousands who once thrived there. Hopefully a few Gazans will remain in Gaza. Maybe someday they’ll be able to live on their homeland without fear.
I have never been to Gaza, and my children have never been to Gaza. Maybe my grandchildren might go one day and read a plaque on some ancient monument that describes how this used to be the land of a people who called themselves Palestinians. They had a rich culture. Delicious food. Beautiful, bright clothing. Now they do not have a homeland anymore because they chose violence over peace. Despite the abundance of olive branches in Gaza, they chose to extend a knife instead.
How do you know Egypt didn’t tell the US?
I’d hope to visit the region some day… go to Israel and talk with Israelis, then visit Palestine and talk to Palestinians. Make up my own mind about the situation. I know now that won’t happen.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the idiots here in the US. There isn’t two sides to the story anymore. The vast majority of us will stand with you, come hell or high water.